Final thoughts
Rock's stretching the word laptop pretty far with the Xtreme Ti. Weighing at 5.6KG or so and featuring a 17-inch screen, the laptop can only be considered for mains operation. Carrying it and the accompanying charger around for any length of time takes its toll on your back. We at HEXUS understand that products are made with certain markets in mind, and the market here is the enthusiast/gamer who wants desktop-like performance in an all-in-one package.Thinking of the Xtreme Ti in strict DTR terms, the overall impression is favourable. You can zip around Windows XP, thanks, in main part, to Rock's use of 2 60GB 7,200RPM laptop drives that are pre-configured in RAID0. Browsing around in 2D mode, the machine felt faster than Dell's Inspiron XPS Gen 2, which shipped with a single 100GB 4,200RPM drive. The screen is a hit-and-miss affair. You'll either love the high-contrast 17-inch (1680x1050) screen or immediately dislike just how reflective the X-Glass-equipped panel is. Rock's got most of the performance bases covered, too, with a fast Mobility Radeon X800 (now XT) card providing decent framerates at the laptop's native resolution. There's also plenty of memory and the optical drive is decent enough.
That's the good points. The bad point, however, are almost as numerous. Rock's tied in with the Clevo D900T chassis. That necessitates using a Pentium 4 Prescott to provide the CPU oomph. The problem that Clevo hasn't addressed fully, and consequently affects Rock, is how to cool the CPU without having extremely warm air spewing out of the vents. Under gaming load the air being pushed out of the left-hand side hovers at around 50c; way too hot if, like me, you're a left-handed person who likes to game with a mouse. A knock-on affect of having so much heat to disperse manifests itself in the keyboard becoming very hot. Clevo's used heatpipes to overcome the heat problem, yet the laptop's numerous fans, when running concurrently, become irritating.
There's no doubt that the Rock Xtreme Ti is a fast, fast gaming laptop. However, Rock really needs to look at the engineering and component choice of, say, Dell's Inspiron XPS Gen 2. It's eerily quiet under load, has an even better graphics card, and, although not the primary concern of a DTR laptop, its battery life is good.
The premium DTR laptop market is a hard place in which to make your name. £2000 may not buy you a much better specced laptop, but it can buy you one that is quiet and cool. Rock's Xtreme Ti's promise is letdown by a mediocre chassis, unfortunately.
HEXUS Right2Reply
Alasdair Bailey from the Rock has provided HEXUS with the following .right2reply response.
rockdirect recommends that the Xtreme Ti is run on a hard flat surface. In the illustration of the output air reaching a high temperature the notebook is operating on a table cloth. Since the cooling system takes air in through the bottom casing, it is vital that the fans aren’t blocked and in this case we suspect that the cloth could have restricting air flow. In our testing we have not seen air outputted at temperatures as high as that displayed on the thermometer in the photograph. This advice is printed in the paper user manual as well as in the PDF version provided on the notebook.
